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A CARIBBEAN FUTURE - by Member of the UN, High Level Task Force on International Financial Reform
- By S Coward
- Published 10-Mar-09
- Economy, Trade & Investment
- Unrated
........
Avinash Persaud - Chairman, Intelligence Capital Limited, Emeritus Professor, Gresham College, Member
of the UN, High Level Task Force on International Financial Reform and Chairman of the Warwick Commission
apersaud@me.com
Ministers, Ambassadors, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, I have a repetitive nightmare. I am sure some of you have the same nightmare too. It is a vision of what could all too easily happen to our beloved Caribbean if we blithely saunter down the low road; if we expect others to deliver our future; if we let drugs take control; if we squander our natural resources and if we turn the asset of our racial and cultural diversities into a liability.
There are, though, other paths the region could take. To find the high road, we need to envision what success looks like. If we don’t know what success looks like, we will not know whether we are headed towards it or away from it. To help us envision success, I would like to invite you to step into my Time Machine.
115 years ago, Heinnman published a novella called “The Time Machine” by H. G. Wells. Youngsters in the audience have no doubt seen the film. The protagonist travels forward 800,000 years. We do not have to travel that far into the future to find a time when the GDP per capital of our islands, for want of a better indicator, could be amongst the highest in tkhe world. What would that future look like when we step off the Time Machine?
Will we see that our children’s children have become wealthy by….growing bananas?
Will we see that they have become wealthy by making automobiles?
Did they get rich weaving baskets? Did they get rich from donors? External consultants?
Remittances? You know the answers to these questions.
There are not many credible paths to success of small islands like ours. Equally,
there is not one path, and there is a role for hydroponics, specialty rums and sugars, bespoke furniture and clothing. But the main avenue of success, one that these others flow from as well, is one where our childrens’ children arrive at the top table by virtue of world-class education and skills, by exporting knowledge and creative services to the world, and doing so from a place that in its natural, built and social environment is the envy of the rest of the world. Let me repeat that in a different way.
Accepting more qualifications, with less quality; paying high wages for low productivity; resisting trade in high-wage service industries so that we can favour trade in low wage sectors and; hoping that our natural environment will magically look after itself, is walking away from success not towards it.
Our long-term economic future lies with exporting expensive, weightless products, that have a small environmental footprint, not products where export success depends on our manual labour being cheaper than elsewhere. When we are a developed Caribbean nation our workforce will be finally transformed, from physical toil under the hot sun, to knowledge and creative work, carried out in inspiring locations.
Around the world, with the advent of advances in ICT, knowledge workers are increasingly choosing to locate their work for lifestyle reasons. US Fund management has moved from downtown Manhattan to Denver, Colorado for the skiing; to New Port Beach, California, for the surfing; to Fort Lauderdale, for the golf; and to Greenwich Connecticut for the schools. If you could chose to locate your work anywhere in the world without it causing any restraint to your business, why would you not be in the
Caribbean?
Our future success is to be found by exploiting our comparative advantage in the knowledge and creative industries, selling, across cyber space and physical space such things as: design services, creative services, research services, diagnostic services; outpatient services; legal services; accounting services, financial services, educational services, editorial services and much more.
DOWNLOAD FULL DOCUMENT BELOW
of the UN, High Level Task Force on International Financial Reform and Chairman of the Warwick Commission
apersaud@me.com
Ministers, Ambassadors, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, I have a repetitive nightmare. I am sure some of you have the same nightmare too. It is a vision of what could all too easily happen to our beloved Caribbean if we blithely saunter down the low road; if we expect others to deliver our future; if we let drugs take control; if we squander our natural resources and if we turn the asset of our racial and cultural diversities into a liability.
There are, though, other paths the region could take. To find the high road, we need to envision what success looks like. If we don’t know what success looks like, we will not know whether we are headed towards it or away from it. To help us envision success, I would like to invite you to step into my Time Machine.
115 years ago, Heinnman published a novella called “The Time Machine” by H. G. Wells. Youngsters in the audience have no doubt seen the film. The protagonist travels forward 800,000 years. We do not have to travel that far into the future to find a time when the GDP per capital of our islands, for want of a better indicator, could be amongst the highest in tkhe world. What would that future look like when we step off the Time Machine?
Will we see that our children’s children have become wealthy by….growing bananas?
Will we see that they have become wealthy by making automobiles?
Did they get rich weaving baskets? Did they get rich from donors? External consultants?
Remittances? You know the answers to these questions.
There are not many credible paths to success of small islands like ours. Equally,
Accepting more qualifications, with less quality; paying high wages for low productivity; resisting trade in high-wage service industries so that we can favour trade in low wage sectors and; hoping that our natural environment will magically look after itself, is walking away from success not towards it.
Our long-term economic future lies with exporting expensive, weightless products, that have a small environmental footprint, not products where export success depends on our manual labour being cheaper than elsewhere. When we are a developed Caribbean nation our workforce will be finally transformed, from physical toil under the hot sun, to knowledge and creative work, carried out in inspiring locations.
Around the world, with the advent of advances in ICT, knowledge workers are increasingly choosing to locate their work for lifestyle reasons. US Fund management has moved from downtown Manhattan to Denver, Colorado for the skiing; to New Port Beach, California, for the surfing; to Fort Lauderdale, for the golf; and to Greenwich Connecticut for the schools. If you could chose to locate your work anywhere in the world without it causing any restraint to your business, why would you not be in the
Caribbean?
Our future success is to be found by exploiting our comparative advantage in the knowledge and creative industries, selling, across cyber space and physical space such things as: design services, creative services, research services, diagnostic services; outpatient services; legal services; accounting services, financial services, educational services, editorial services and much more.
DOWNLOAD FULL DOCUMENT BELOW
